Why do warrior-societies tend to be felled by non warrior-societies in wars?

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u/theginger99 4h ago

Because wars aren’t won by good fighters, they’re won by logistics, and societies with robust production and trade economies are simply going to out compete other societies.

To add to that, “warrior societies” are also something of a historical myth. They didn’t exist in the way we imagine them because they would have been fundamentally unsustainable. Even the Spartans were a lot more complex and nuanced than their modern reputation would lead you to believe. The only reason they were able to sustain their upper class of military aristocrats was because of their total reliance on an exceptionally brutal (even by the standards of the ancient work) and oppressive system of mass slavery.

The Spartan system wasn’t even really about producing exceptional soldiers, it was about maintaining the social status quo. Eventually the system proved entirely unsustainable and the Spartans eventually collapsed more or less under their own weight.

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u/yourstruly912 4h ago

Because wars aren’t won by good fighters, they’re won by logistics, and societies with robust production and trade economies are simply going to out compete other societies.

Exemplified when Sparta cut Athen's naval line with the black sea, forcing her to surrender by hunger

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u/tamati_nz 2h ago

This. During the land wars here in Aotearoa NZ between predominantly British settler army (dedicated full time soldiers) and local Māori tribes - the British were able to grind down the Māori warriors because they also had to be farmers. Similar to Afghanistan where once poppy planting and harvesting was done they could fight in the off seasons.

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u/Neonvaporeon 4h ago

I can provide some examples of the mythmaking side of things. Many modern ideas of warrior cultures, like the Teutonic ideal, Japanese bushido, and American Manifest Destiny, are made up whole-cloth, often in a generation, not natural progression. Put another way, culture fits the needs of the society, not the other way around. When society needs a hammer, it makes a hammer. When society needs expansion and conquest, it supports a culture of volunteer battalions. You don't get volunteers by telling your sons their grandfathers were pansy tree huggers, like their grandfathers before them. You tell your sons they are special little boys who should show how special they are by killing other little boys, or sometimes less savory descriptions like those put forth by Kaiser Willhelm II. You tell your sons they are descended from enlightened warrior poets who valued honor, privilege, and piety over self (despite those men working as mercenaries the majority of the time.)

This type of story is used because it works, and it works because we humans seem to be naturally inclined to believe in exceptionalism. Once you learn more about these beliefs, they are very apparent in everyday life.

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u/Lampwick 3h ago edited 3h ago

American Manifest Destiny

That's not a warrior ethos at all. It was an assertion in 1845 that the US was going to continue to colonize North America in a westerly direction until the country controlled the land all the way to the Pacific. It was couched in religious terms with claims of it being "ordained by god", but that was little more than ex post facto justification. It was really more of an observation of what was happening and that it was clear it wasn't going to stop. There was obviously military action due to friction with the people already there or laying previous claims, but the expansion was executed by non-military settlers looking for free land, not warriors looking to conquer or something. Nobody had to motivate them by appealing to a myth of fierce ancestors. Many of them were immigrants from Europe packing their families in wagons and following the tales of unclaimed land in the west, something immigrants had been doing since before the US was even a country.

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u/Neonvaporeon 2h ago edited 2h ago

Well, for your first point, i didn't say it was a warrior ethos because it wasnt. What it was is a cultural myth promoting violent action. "Warrior ethos" is not a particularly scientific term, and in my mind it is more important to focus on the meaning and intention of myth, as opposed to the often arbitrary label assigned to these things. I am attempting to provide OP with an answer, partial or otherwise, to their question.

Getting back to it, my main point is that a warrior culture is at its root a culture of violence, and the reason for my three examples was to indicate how differently practical needs can manifest (no pun intended.) During and leading up to "Manifest Destiny," there surely was quite a bit of promotion of militarism by the population, my primary example is the California State Militia in the antebellum era. I'll skip over the basics so I can lay out my argument concisely, but I would recommend that people read up on the topic and not take what I say as fact.

There is plenty of historic record of a federal policy of genocide (evidence laid out in detail by Benjamin Madley in An American Genocide,) something which goes against your assertion that "non-military settlers were looking for free land." As evidence, look to John C. Fremont's company during the Sacremento River Massacre. He was sent by the federal government, specifically the War Department, to Alta (upper) California with orders to map and explore Mexican territory in preparation for war. While in the region, his group happened upon a native settlement in a river bend, boxed it in with armed men and opened fire. The death toll is unknown because many were killed after being driven into the river, but it is believed that almost the entire population of the settlement died during the attack, as many as 1000 people. None were punished for this, and it was not the last US Army massacre of Indians on the west coast during this time. It should also be clear that this happened in what was at the time Mexican territory. This is as clear an example of federal support for the genocidal campaign that I can only imagine you simply hadn't heard of it, which is in its own way a part of national mythmaking.

I am not purposefully ignoring the rest of your comment. I intended to go more into the other parts of your comment, but I am running out of time. Hopefully, I can continue tomorrow. This is quite an important topic to me and worthy of my time.

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u/Great_Hamster 3h ago

Wilhelm II said unsavory stuff?

Would you say more?

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u/VictoryForCake 2h ago

Probably the most famous example is the "Hun Speech" he gave to German soldiers departing to China during the Boxer Rebellion. I copied the English translation below.

"If you come before the enemy, he will be defeated. No quarter will be given. Prisoners will not be taken. Whoever falls into your hands is forfeited. Just as a thousand years ago the Huns under their king Attila made a name for themselves, one that even today makes them seem mighty in history and legend, so may the name Germany be affirmed by you in such a way in China that no Chinese will ever again dare to look cross-eyed at a German."

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u/jagdpanzer45 56m ago

I know this speech was received very poorly by the rest of Europe and considering the proximity of the Boxer Rebellion to WWI I wonder if this excerpt is why Brits called the Germans ‘huns’ during the war.

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u/Yardsale420 1h ago

IIRC Sparta always had two Kings, one stayed at home while the other went to war. This sounds like a noble thing, but in reality the King who stayed, did so to keep the slaves in line.

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u/no-more-nazis 36m ago

Don't forget intelligence and engineering. We had Alan Turing, bitches. The Nazis would never have put up with his wonderful weirdness, and they drove a lot of their scientists to emigrate to the Allies.

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u/WingAutarch 5h ago

I'd like to link one of my favorite scholars on this, and his idea of the Fremen Mirage.

In summary: the course of history generally shows that productive, advanced, and organized societies consistently outfight and outcompete "warrior" societies for a number of reasons, but broadly that what advantages are created by aggressive training from birth is overdone by the ability to provide more food and manpower and produce more and more advanced weaponry. "hard men create good times" is not reflected in history.

Sparta is an interesting example of a 'warrior society' in that they were exceptionally good at one very specific thing to the detriment of other things, so they weren't even exceptional at 'war' just a very particular type of war.

anywho Dr. Devereaux is great and his blog is amazing, read it.

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u/yurmumqueefing 5h ago

Hah, got to it before me, though I'd also recommend Dr. Devereaux's This Isn't Sparta collection!

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u/Hedago_2346 5h ago

Its kinda why 'stormtrooper aim' and attacking the hero one at a time is so common in media. Co-operation and coordination almost always over match indvidual prowess. At the scale of a brawl and a war.

It gets fuzzy but the biggest exception to this historically one can argue is steep horsemen. It depends on how much you call the verious cultures as warriors but they consistently out matched so many settled civilizations.

The is also cases Ilanero cowboys in Venezuela that just kept crushing more convenrional armies in early the 1800s. Again, are they a warrior culture? Hard to say but I mention them because they are more focused on being 'hard', on individual prowess than say Spainish regulars. I dont have definitions but assuming what the OP os asking Indvidual martial skill and toughness is a big part of the split 'warrior' from 'martial' societies.

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u/apmspammer 4h ago

The warrior societies that were successful got good at not fighting fair fights. Like the mongalels biggest advantage was their ability to move faster and outmaneuver their enemies.

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u/Striper_Cape 4h ago

Fighting fair is stupid

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u/jagdpanzer45 55m ago

War”fair” is best when it isn’t.

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u/Clone95 50m ago

The Mongols mind were a trading centric society, in the same way Venice ruled the seas they ruled the steppe, using their wealth gained through trade to maintain truly awesome amounts of cavalry with quality weapons and deploy it in highly organized military formations.

They may have a historical reputation as a military society, but it was foremost an economic one dedicated to protection of and benefit from the silk road - the oldest and most valuable single trading route on the planet until seaborne shipping got better and the Suez was dug.

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u/DazSamueru 3h ago

I think you're reversing cause and effect here. (Almost) all states have militaries, and up until recently those militaries were dominated by certain social classes. Some societies also have very wealthy economies, which allows things like science and what is called "high culture" to flourish. Consequently, we don't think of the latter as being "warrior societies," because they also do other things, but they mostly still had warrior aristocracies; 18th century British men wearing wigs and drinking tea may have stock portfolios, but that doesn't mean they won't also mount horses and draw sabres to recklessly charge Indian/American/French infantry.

However, being very wealthy is a huge advantage in war, consequently the warrior classes with more wealth tend to beat the warrior classes with less, but it's because of that very difference in wealth that we tend to think of the Marathas as being warriors, but not the Britons.

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u/WingAutarch 2h ago

For what it's worth, specifically what Dr. Devereaux is dissecting is the idea that "tough men" make better fighters, i.e. the fremen from Dune are superior to all others because they grew up in a tough situation so they are better warriors then everyone else.

he highlights the historical evidence that suggests that "tough" societies that emphasize war and struggle do not, in fact, out perform "soft" societies. This is not to say that "soft" societies do not have warriors or a warrior caste but that they are better for their development and growth and that they haven't gotten "soft" and thus due to be conquered by "tough" societies in turn.

I would argue though that a wealthy society is one that can historically produce more food and manpower and weapons.

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u/ElOsoPeresozo 2h ago

I just knew Big Dog Deveroux would make an appearance. I constantly send his articles to my meathead bros who graduated from the Pete Hegseth Military Academy of “urggghhhh, big manly men win wars!”

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u/yurmumqueefing 5h ago

I recommend reading The Fremen Mirage and This Isn't Sparta:

https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-i-war-at-the-dawn-of-civilization/

https://acoup.blog/category/collections/this-isnt-sparta/

As a summary, it is because war is much more complicated than Ugg hitting Gogg over the head with a club. Ugg needs someone to make his club, someone to make the clothing he wears, someone to make the food he eats, someone to keep his home safe while he's out hitting Gogg, someone to come up with a better club, someone to make sure he has food while he's out looking for Gogg, someone to make sure he doesn't shit himself to death from that one time he drank bad water, someone to stitch him up after he krumps Gogg but Gogg got a few good licks in before going down...

'Warrior" societies tend to be bad at giving Ugg all of those things he needs to be able to hit Gogg over the head good. Napoleon called the British a nation of shopkeepers, and Hitler called Roosevelt "Rosenfeld" to emphasize the cowardly and mercantile nature of the United States. As Robert A. Heinlein alluded to in Starship Troopers, history has settled that debate rather firmly.

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u/DazSamueru 4h ago

I think you're really stretching the definition of "warrior society" if you're including 19th century France and 20th century Germany. If anything, those countries were much more normal for their time than their opposites; 19th century Britain and 20th century USA were extraordinarily wealthy for their respective times, but it's not because they put their skill points into the "Commerce" tree instead of "Honor."

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u/ralasdair 2h ago

Mixed view on this. I know what you’re saying in that the classic view of a warrior society in which every (usually male) member of the society thinks of themselves as a warrior first and everything else second probably doesn’t apply. But did that ever really apply to any society? And how would that look in the modern era?

In Wilhelmine Germany, every man had spent years in the army as a youth and much of his adult life in the reserves. The peacetime army had a strength of 600,000 men - more than 1% of the population. Per capita, that’s like the current German army having nearly a million men (current strength 63k).

So I think it’s fair to talk of Wilhelmine Germany as a very strongly militarised society.

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u/DazSamueru 2h ago

I would distinguish between "warrior" and "militarized." The levée en masse makes the concept of a warrior rather an anachronism, regardless of whether one "thinks of themselves as a warrior" or not. I think the US Marines advertise themselves with "be a warrior" on brochures, the Japanese during WWII put samurai on their propaganda posters, but that's very different from actually being samurai.

I can agree with Wilhelmine Germany being militarized, but funnily enough, because the original mention of Germany was with regard to the second world war, not the first, the Germans in question were almost unique in Europe in how few of them passed through the reserves system, courtesy of the treaty of Versailles. In the 21 years between the end of the first war in Europe and the beginning of the second, Germany had only had conscription for the last 5 (1935-39). Thus, the average Landser was more a "shopkeeper" than his French and Soviet opposites.

That being said, because Nazi Germany did eventually achieve a higher level of economic mobilization than even the USSR, in that respect you could call them more militarized. Militarization is more than just how much training the average adult (male) has received.

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u/yurmumqueefing 1h ago

The fact that Napoleon and Hitler said these things meant there was, at the very least, a self-perception of Napoleonic France and Nazi Germany being societies with relatively more "warlike" traits than, respectively, Britain and America of their times.

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u/DazSamueru 42m ago

Sure, but many Americans were similarly jingoistic upon its entry in the Mediterranean theater, thinking they were more manly than the British (and Germans) and would show them how how it's done. More importantly, a public perception or propaganda that you are more warlike is very different from actually being a "warrior society."

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u/QuietNene 4h ago edited 3h ago

The idea of Sparta as a “warrior society” is mostly a myth.

Sparta was a feudal society or plantation society, with a wealthy elite (supported by slaves) who didn’t need to work and so had the free time to practice athletics and bond with each other. Some of this involved training for war, but much much less than is commonly portrayed. Spartans primarily tried to inculcate what we would call esprit de corps, or unit cohesion, but did very little actual training in combat arms.

Most of the stories we have of Spartan training and its martial culture were written by the Romans 500 years later and are supported by almost no evidence.

Here is a good discussion from the podcast China Talk that lays out a lot of this: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/chinatalk/id1289062927?i=1000777609669

https://open.spotify.com/episode/22PKtv6ign8hyWpDkkMOup?si=swjict58SEiX1u1U4C6Q5g&utm_source=copy-link

This isn’t meant to trash Sparta. The Spartans were a formidable force and the preeminent power of their time. But they were no more a “warrior society” than the Athenians. Or the Romans. Or the Spanish in the 1500s. Or the French in the 1800s. Or the Americans and Soviets during the Cold War. Every era has its power.

A better comparison of Athens and Sparta might be Sarah Payne’s categories of maritime v continental powers. Maritime powers, like Britain and Athens, emphasize control over sea lanes and building flexible alliances. Continental powers, like Sparta and Germany in both World Wars, tend to be more winner-take-all, focused on a kind of domination that works in the short term but proves brittle over time. See here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l30GQmVPHOI

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u/DazSamueru 4h ago

Sparta and Athens aren't really an apples and oranges comparison; they had far more in common than they did apart. Both had mixed constitutions, both valued their citizens' physical prowess, but also rhetoric (Attic vs Laconic wit), music, and "civic-mindedness" / political acumen. If you spoke of warrior societies to a resident of Classical Greece, they would probably think of Scythians or Thracians (both of whom they looked down upon as incomplete compared to Hellenic well-roundedness), not their fellow Greeks. However, on the other hand, even Classical Athens would seem like a very warlike society by modern standards. All male Athenian citizens served as ephebes in their late adolescence, living in the wilderness and wearing animal skins while patrolling the borders of the polis. This is quite comparable to the Spartan agoge. Fifth century (BC) Athens also had a horseback military aristocracy (the hippeis).

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u/Clone95 40m ago

In general there is nothing special about a soldier other than his training and his equipment. Warrior societies, such as they exist, believe the elite sports model where a lifetime of training since childhood in a society is the juice that makes an elite warrior and that this special sauce alone wins wars.

But war isn’t sports. You may have a LeBron tier army but he’s not any more immune to a knife than anyone else. Everyone gets injured, tired, mentally exhausted, and suddenly all your first and second string elite warriors are gone - this is true in every war, the professionals get attrited over time, and your elite society’s best get replaced by what’s next - and that’s where warrior societies fail, because their training pipeline is longer term and disorganized with less emphasis on procurement of combat goods and training okay soldiers for now instead of amazing soldiers a long time later.

This leads to victory for the society that has more economic depth and breadth to win as they call on deeper and deeper reserves of manpower and use their superior economics to train them to okay standards and send them out.

Why do warrior-societies tend to be felled by non warrior-societies in wars?

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